Call for submissions: Audre Lorde-inspired performances

The Marlborough Theatre and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts are delighted to announce two new commissions for BAME LGBTQ+ artists to create a new 15-minute performance inspired by Audre Lorde!

Following on from 2017’s successful Thinking Queer: Bloomsbury Group, TMT and ACCA are excited to present another night of reflection, resistance, poetics and power, this time to celebrate the work of trailblazing writer, thinker and activist Audre Lorde.

Desiree Reynolds award £10,000 for second novel

Author of Seduce, Desiree Reynolds, has been granted £10,000 by Arts Council England as part of the Develop Your Creative Practice Scheme.

The £14.4m fund is specifically designed to support independent creative practitioners, in recognition of the fact that Project Grants aren't always suitable for solo professional development or time to write. Unlike Project Grants, the money from DYCP doesn't require an artist to show their work at the end; it's purely for artists to take their work in new and exciting directions without the pressure to deliver.

Leone Ross joins Zadie Smith, Irvine Welsh and Kazuo Ishiguro

Leone Ross will be published alongside Zadie Smith, Irvine Welsh, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith, Mark Haddon, Helen Dunmore and many more famous names in the new anthology, The Penguin Book of the Contemporary Short Story! Leone's story was picked up from Come Let Us Sing Anyway.

The anthology covers fiction from the two decades between the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (1997) to today.

Loretta Collins Klobah wins PEN Translates award!

The Sea Needs No Ornament, edited and translated from Spanish by Loretta Collins Klobah and Maria Grau Perejoan, has won a PEN Translates award.

Books from seventeen countries and ten languages make up the latest round of PEN Translates award winners. These include poetry collections from the Caribbean, Indonesia, The Netherlands and Iran, novels from Sudan, Cape Verde and Syria, and autofiction from Peru.

Leone Ross, Jeremy Poynting discuss Come Let Us Sing Anyway

Linda Mannheim talks to Leone Ross about her short story collection Come Let Us Sing Anyway. In addition, Peepal Tree Press' Managing Editor Jeremy Poynting talks about how he founded the Leeds-based independent press that became the largest publisher of Caribbean writing in the world and explains why they decided to publish Leone Ross’s first short story collection.

Joseph Bloncourt, an EMT living in New York, also talks about why he started reading Come Let Us Sing Anyway during his commute.

Redemption song: A 2006 profile of Wilson Harris

The Caribbean Nobel laureate Derek Walcott paid humorous tribute to Harris in a poem called "Guyana", whose "surveyor", his brain sucked "pith-dry" by the sun, is "dumbstruck by a stone". His admirers have included Anthony Burgess, CLR James and the US poet Kathleen Raine as well as younger authors with Caribbean links - Caryl Phillips, Pauline Melville and Fred D'Aguiar. Yet despite a steady output of novels, essays and international honours, he remains little known to a wider public.